Lighting of 3D geometry is widely used in computer-aided design. Lighting of 3D geometry includes the computation of color intensities at predetermined points on the model using a physical simulation requiring the location of a light source(s), a color of a light source(s), a location of a viewer, and a normal vector at the point on the model being lit. The normal vector in this case is defined as the vector orthogonal to a vector that lies in the plane tangent to the model being lit at that point. The computation of color intensities is dependent on calculating the amount of light that will reach the viewers eye given the preceding conditions. This amount is dependent on the contribution from ambient light in the scene in which the 3D model is viewed, diffuse light that is scattered in all directions as it strikes the models surface, and specular light that is reflected directly back to the viewers eye. Each of these aforementioned amounts can be computed by executing a separate component of a full lighting equation. The technical challenge is not how to execute the lighting equation, rather how to execute it in real-time without sacrificing quality or accuracy. Current state of the art employs specialized graphics hardware to encode and execute the full lighting equation in a real-time display system. Although this solution is appropriate for workstation and PC level systems, the form factor, heat dissipation, and power utilization make it problematic for low power devices such as cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants. Additionally, the lighting computation is traditionally executed using floating point arithmetic which is currently unavailable in low power processors. Commercial solutions such as nVidia GeForce4 TI and ATI Radeon 9500 encode the entire geometry pipeline including lighting in a graphics hardware ASIC that utilizes optimized floating point arithmetic to perform computations. This invention provides another solution that can be applied to any display system, but is particularly well suited to a new class of devices that is quickly becoming ubiquitous in today's computer system industry. These devices include cell phones, Personal Digital Systems, GPS navigation systems, and any other display system that has low power requirements and is resource constrained. This invention provides a solution to computing a lighting component in real-time using integer dataypes and power of two scaling factors during a preprocessing step. The use of integer, power of two scaling factors, and arithmetic shift instructions provides a method for computing the integer dot product of a light vector and normal to which a material property is applied using a lower number of processor cycles. This enables real-time accurate lighting without use of floating point.